Sweet Romance11 min read
I Woke Up in a CEO’s Mansion and Opened a Game Café
ButterPicks13 views
I blinked and the world flipped from my cramped, familiar bed to a floor so cold it stole the heat from my calves. One second I was cursing at a teammate on voice chat; the next second I was on marble tiles with chandeliers glaring down like stars.
"Who are you?" a voice said.
I looked up. He sat like a statue on a velvet sofa, the kind of man in movie posters that made my brain short-circuit. His jaw was sharp. His suit was a different art form. His eyes were winter water.
"I—" I tried to stand. My legs wobble-walked me up. "Am I at a cosplay convention?"
He smiled like a blade. He reached with fingers that could have carved sculptures and pinched my chin.
"Adelyn Washington," he said, slow as if tasting the name, "sign this divorce. One week."
"What? Who—" My head tried to line up memory like tiles. I had a name in that body. A life, apparently. A husband named Dalton Davis. Dalton Davis, the chairman of Davis Industries. My game account was still logged into a different life, but my body? This body had a husband and a whole soap opera attached.
"Don't test me," Dalton said. His grip tightened.
"Hey, dude, chill," I blurted, because when in doubt be ridiculous. "You got the wrong gamer."
He released my chin. "One week," he repeated.
I sat down hard. "One week to do what? To finish a raid?"
He didn't smile. "Sign the agreement. Give her back what she never earned."
I only dimly remembered the name he used—Beatrice. Beatrice Coleman, the pale, helpless cousin who had the air of a porcelain puppet. According to memory flashes, Beatrice had glued herself to my husband like a burr on fleece and had convinced everyone she was the fragile angel while I was supposed to be the scheming wife who stole happiness.
"Beatrice?" I repeated.
"Don't test me."
I opened my mouth and instead of fury I felt cheeky. "Okay," I said. "You're asking for a divorce. That's cool. We were clearly a bad team in ranked. But also, my phone—"
I fished my phone out from a leather side table. It was heavy and named in the contacts, not with a pet name, but "Husband."
I grinned and tapped.
"In the Southeast server, who's top in Arena?" I typed to myself in a message app out of pure habit. Then I changed the message to Dalton.
"In the world," I sent, "do you know where the divorce form is?"
The screen lit up: "Say nothing."
I sighed. "Say what?"
He replied, two words: "Sign it."
I signed for the taste of it. I felt something like relief and nothing like grief.
The house breathed like a beast around us. A woman who looked like a grandmother in a neat uniform—Celine Cooley, the house manager—took the stack and promised to handle it.
"Don't be down, miss," she said. "He'll come around."
"Hard pass," I muttered. "I came into this life clutching a sweet-tooth addiction and a penchant for lounging. I'm not about to starve for a marriage that feeds him."
I spent the rest of the afternoon testing the pockets of my stunning wardrobe and the limits of my new phone's data. This world had a game—King's Arena—that lit up as much as the gossip feeds. I installed the app like a woman finding her religion.
"Are you really going to play in that dress?" Celine asked.
"Of course. A good match needs a good outfit. Also, I bought 300 purple coins for this character in one go," I declared.
"Madam," she said, eyes soft, "we're wealthy and foolish, yes."
I laughed. It felt good, like cracking knuckles.
I learned the setup quick. Adelyn Washington had history. She'd been raised with society's polishing cloths. She'd married Dalton because of family pressure. She had a cousin—Beatrice—who played bridal victim with Oscar-level performance. Adelyn's parents loved her; Beatrice had slipped into the household when she was a child who had no parents. Everyone felt pity for the small pale thing while Adelyn had been arranged into a golden cage.
I wasn't her. I was a gamer who knew how to say "gg" and "afk." But I had her memories like a cheat code. Memory told me Beatrice had phantom pregnancies and manipulated crises. Memory told me Dalton was cold, and that Adelyn had stayed because of pride, futures, and stock prices.
"Sign the papers, return the name of the house, and we won't make it uglier than a bad patch," Dalton said the first time like he cut a villain out of a film.
"Why are you so dramatic?" I asked. "You sure you're CEO and not auditioning for 'Mean Boss of the Year'?"
He didn't laugh.
I decided to have fun while I still could. I took pictures, I opened the comments on my social feed, and I did something reckless: I replied to a flirty comment by a wildly famous businessman—Manuel Camacho—calling him "Dad" as a joke.
It trended. The internet loved the absurdity. The scroll filled with memes: "Call your dad for loot." The narrative around my life spun like a centrifuge, and the rumor mill fed on speed.
"You're playing PR like minigames," Celine observed.
"Exactly," I said. "If life gives you rotten headlines, make them into crafting material."
Business and gossip moved fast. When we went to the Davis-Nimble banquet—a glitzy dinner that felt like a scene I woke into—Dalton wanted to take Beatrice in front of everyone. I had the option of making the banquet a battlefield, but I'd learned comfortable vengefulness: sometimes you win by letting the other side march into a trap.
At the banquet, my phone rang. It was Dane Stephens, cool as moonlight, a wealthy friend who had been Adelyn's confidant in memory. "Take the third-floor room with me," he whispered. "Trust me."
"I trust you as much as I trust a bronze player who says 'I'm smurfing,'" I teased.
But Dane was serious. He and I played handheld duels backstage while the adults negotiated airs of civility. He bought me time to breathe and to realize I liked the way his smile didn't demand a return.
When Beatrice performed her well-timed faint on the stairs and rolled down like a practiced stunt, I said the simplest thing that grounded the whole farce: "Check the security."
They did. The recording replayed on phones and a hundred eyes.
Beatrice had run forward, then staged a dramatic fall. Her lips trembled in a perfect packet of fake sorrow. The camera picked up the tiny boost of momentum she gave herself, the careful tilt.
"She jumped," Dane said, stunned, but not surprised.
Beatrice's face tightened. She tried to speak. "No—no—this—this is—"
Dane tapped the clip, ignored the lies, and said, "She did it on purpose."
The room quieted in a way that was not silence; it was the sound of a hundred murmurs pressing pause.
Dalton's eyes—cold as a shuttered window—shifted and landed on me like a spotlight. He had believed her lie for so long.
"She was set up," I said, because truth's weight helped me stand.
"But the cameras—" Dalton began.
"Are honest," I said. "You just wanted them to lie to you."
He left. He walked out like a man exiting a chapter that had been written too small for him.
I signed the papers for real and went home. I built a plan with Dane and Manuel who, in secret, had more funds and more patience than any fairy godparent. We agreed on my real dream: to open a gaming café where players could ladder up, where tournaments would be real and prizes honest. I would pour my focus into esports, into arcade light and cheering.
I traded the chairman's chair for a keyboard.
For a while the world tripped and laughed and I answered internet questions in emojis. The press picked at me like seagulls at a picnic; but my gaming friends posted screenshots and cheered. The net café project rallied. I called it "The Neon Nest" and could not stop smiling.
Then everything turned darker. Dalton, in secret rage, started selling off his shares in what looked like a carefully tuned stock-strike. The market stuttered. My company's price plummeted.
"He's trying to hurt me," I said to Dane over drinks.
"He's trying to hurt more than you," Dane said. "He's trying to hurt the family. But he can't hurt what's already not his."
He was half right. But Dalton did more. He crossed a line no story should cross: he plotted the impossible—kidnap and organ theft. He believed that with enough fear he could tie the hands of everyone he hated. He hired men who were slippery in suits and colder than a basement. Late one night, a car swerved. My driver stumbled. I woke to the scent of antiseptic and iron.
"You're in the hospital," said a man in a beige coat. "You lost a lot of blood. We did all we could."
"They tried to—" I whispered, memories coalescing into a nightmare.
"I called the police," said a heavy voice. "We got a 911 tip."
I opened my eyes to detectives and blinking lights and one word repeating like a pulse: betrayal.
That betrayal set the law in motion.
Dalton told himself he could get away with it. He thought laws bent for the rich. He thought lies wore crowns. He forgot two things: evidence and the human tendency to talk to journalists. He forgot that Dane had been collecting transfers and messages and bribes like receipts for a claim.
The police moved in.
They arrested Dalton at dawn. They cuffed him in a dress coat. He looked... ordinary as a man who'd just been stripped of fiction.
Beatrice's reaction was the thing I hadn't planned: instead of fleeing quietly, she tried to be a victim again. But some victims become villains and then victims again in the span of a single breath.
Corporate gossip erupted. Stocks traded like wildfire. Manuel Camacho and Dane and a host of witnesses built a wall of proof. And then—because humans like finales—the country wanted a reckoning. They wanted to watch the arrogance come down.
The punishment I will describe came later that month. We staged it where the city would see: the Davis-Nimble shareholders' celebratory gala, where Dalton had planned to rally support and salvage his image. None of that happened.
They brought them to the stage.
"Sit," Dane said quietly to me.
A hundred camera bulbs opened like a row of stars. The table of celebrated businessmen, the glittering audience, the reporters—every face was a shutter.
We had a video, clean and cold. It started with laughs: a private dinner Dalton attended with men who thought themselves bigger than the law. Then it cut to bank statements, heavy with numbers. Then to the calls, the messages. There were text threads where men joked about repainting a life with stolen parts. There were transfers to a small clinic that did not exist. There were surveillance clips of men entering a private residence with a stretcher.
"We did not stage anything," Dane said into his mic. "We put the records together. We handed them to the police. We gave them to the press."
The projector flicked to a frame where Dalton sat in a private filming room with a man from the clinic. The man spoke in a hushed voice, his face unblinking. "We remove it tonight," he said. "We will be careful."
The crowd went cold.
Dalton stood. He stood like a man who had his ribs opened and the breath taken out.
"That video is..." his voice cracked. He tried to smile. He tried to pull the truth into something softer. "This is—" He stumbled and then shouted. "This isn't real."
"Why are you shouting?" a voice in the room asked. It was a reporter, direct and cruel in fairness. "You are on the stage, Mr. Davis. This is your footage."
"That video was doctored!" Dalton spat. "It is fake! I would never—"
Then the room began to speak. Human things did the rest. A woman near the front stood up and held a phone screen: it had her name, time stamps, a text she'd received—a direct message from Dalton's account asking for payment to silence the clinic. Another man—his suit a little tatty, his hands trembling—had a photo of the same clinic's ledger.
"Is it true?" someone asked Beatrice.
She smiled a practiced smile that slid like oil. "I never wanted any of this," she said. "I am sick. I was fragile. I am the victim here."
They brought up the security clips. They slowed them. The room watched as Beatrice rehearsed collapses on the stair and deliberately placed herself where cameras could see. They watched as she texted a photographer minutes later to sell a staged tear to a tabloid.
Beatrice's color drained like paint from a toy. "No—no—this can't—"
A hundred observers turned. People took out their phones and started streaming. The words streamed across social platforms as if thrown from a cliff. The sound of cameras and keyboard taps became the soundtrack of public judgment.
"Do you have anything to say? Anything to explain?" the moderator asked.
Beatrice's face did something I barely recognized—panic, then a brief flicker of fury, then collapse. "I—" she tried. "I did it for us. For our family. For his love—"
His love? Dalton's face didn't soften. He looked at her as if she had asked him to forgive a storm.
"What did you want?" I asked aloud, because even in the middle of this, I couldn't help asking.
Beatrice's eyes were hard, suddenly devoid of that porcelain innocence. "Security," she whispered. "He promised me security."
"At the cost of other people's organs?" someone hissed.
She crumpled. "I never wanted to hurt anyone," she sobbed, and somewhere between confession and collapse there was a cigar of truth. She had wanted a life cemented by a title. She'd chosen a dangerous path and had helped build a ladder with other people's bones.
"And you," I said to Dalton, "is your apology for sale or already canceled?"
He laughed—a full, rough sound. "You think this ends me? You think money can't fix this?"
"He broke the law," Dane said, steady as a metronome. "He tried to buy silence, he tried to buy bodies, he trafficked in fear. The police have the rest."
Dalton's face went through cycles in front of me: denial, anger, pleading, then smallness. He reached out suddenly as if to clutch a robe of dignity, then realized there was nothing to clutch. His posture folded.
"You're not the only monster here," Beatrice spat suddenly, like a child who'd been told to pick a scab to prove pain. "You made me practice. We both—"
"Shut up," Dalton hissed. "Shut up." And then he lifted his head and, to his credit, tried at last something the audience wanted to see: contrition. "I was wrong," he said. It was thin. "I allowed pride to guide me."
The crowd made a sound that was not applause. It was release. Reporters swarmed like bees around a wounded hive. The videos and documents were uploaded in the span of a minute. Social feeds exploded. People in the room who hadn't had their names dragged into scandal felt vindicated.
Beatrice's reaction shot through stages: at first a wild, animal panic—her face blazed with disbelief—then a slow, stubborn denial, then a desperate clawing at the idea that the world would let her be anything but the victim she had cultivated. She started to cry, then to shout, then to plea. A few in the crowd took to recording soundbites; others whispered and passed phone numbers to detectives they knew. People who'd been fooled by her pleasant face now spat.
At the end, far from the flicker of studio lights, the two of them had been exposed: one as a man who would attempt to trade morals for power, and the other as a woman who perfected victimhood as a mask to take what she wanted. The show was not blood; it was starker—paper and light and the sudden exhaustion of a lie.
They were not physically dragged from the stage. They were taken, instead, by the new force of the crowd's knowledge, by the legal hands that had been building the case; their reputations, once monolithic, cracked under public pressure.
Dane turned to me after the lights dimmed. "Are you okay?" he asked, and his voice was the most ordinary sound in the room, which was exactly what I wanted.
"I'm fine," I said.
The cameras kept rolling. The city outside pulsed with stories. Social feeds ate the footage for days.
The punishment was public. It was messy and not as dramatic as a hammer coming down. It was worse in some ways: they were exposed. Beatrice's denials became shriller. Dalton's threats grew smaller and thinner every minute.
The crowd's reaction changed them. Faces that once bowed to them now pointed. People who had admired their carriage posted evidence. The two of them, once entitled, now had to live each day without the warm cloak of assumed innocence. Even better: investors pulled away.
It was revenge that fit: not blood, but daylight.
After that, the world rebalanced. The stock market steadied, the tech titans picked their teams, and my little plan—The Neon Nest—went from novelties and jokes to a launch people wanted to support.
Dane and Manuel and a group of honest investors helped me sign off.
The Neon Nest opened in neon and laughs and the smell of fries. I sat on an elevated stool on opening night and watched players queue like worshipers.
"Remember when you said you'd give your life to esports?" Dane whispered.
"I did," I said. "I lied. I gave one life to a game, and I took back another."
He leaned close, and for the first time, in a world that had nearly cut me open for parts, I let my guard down.
"Stay," he said.
"I will," I said. "On one condition."
"Name it."
"Teach me how to ladder properly."
He laughed. "Deal."
We didn't say "always" or "forever." We didn't need to. The Neon Nest's sign buzzed above us. My phone chimed with messages from players who wanted tips, sponsors who wanted to talk, and a man named Manuel who messaged, "Congrats, Dad."
I laughed and typed back, "Thanks, Dad." Then I looked at Dane and added, "Now let's queue."
The screen lit up. I pushed into a game and felt ridiculous joy bubble up like soda. The world was messy. People had been cruel. People had been punished. But for now, I was at my desk with a headset that fit just right, and the person on my team said, "Go," and I clicked, and the match began.
The End
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